Month: August 2024

Ruins of Malbeth: Religion, Part 2: Dualism

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This is part of a series of posts on about an old D&D campaign world called Malbeth.
Go to the Ruins of Malbeth: Introduction post or to The Ruins of Malbeth: Religion, Part 1: Animism

Dualism is baked into D&D and its source material from swords & sorcery fiction. It’s what gives us the original alignments: Lawful, Neutral, and Chaotic, and seen expanded with the inclusion of the good-evil axis as well as the law-chaos one.

I decided to deviate some from that, and use the Feywild and the Shadowfell as the opposing forces. I explained this in the player’s guide:

The dualists of Malbeth believe that the Feywild and the Shadowfell are more than echoes of the Material Plane; they are, instead, dual forces that bring the Material Plane into existence. For Malbeth’s dualists the Feywild is a realm of perpetual dawn. They regard the Feywild as the source of potentiality and becomingness that creates existence. The Shadowfell, on the other hand, is regarded as a dark, bleak realm that is the source of corruption and destructive forces, a warped and twisted dark parody of the Material Plane. While the Feywild is free neither from death nor from evil, the Shadowfell is home to little good and the source of undeath.

The dualists of Malbeth often refer to the Feywild as the Coming Dawn and the Growing Light, and they often refer to the Shadowfell as the Never-ending Darkness, the Shadow Realm, or, simply, the Shadow.

All but a few of Malbeth’s dualists, regardless of alignment or race, worship the power of Shadowfell, but instead see it as a threat that must be resisted and contained.

Using that as the basic framework for dualism, I imagined the divine caster classes along the following lines.

  • Clerics: Dualist clerics who serve the source of the Feywild may be of any alignment and choose from any of the following divine domains: knowledge, life, light, nature, tempest, trickery, and war. Dualist clerics of the Shadowfell are always evil and affiliated with the divine domain of death.
  • Druids: Circle of the Moon druids are dualists who draw their power from the verdant powers of Feywild.
  • Paladins, Oath of the Ancients: Oath of the Ancients paladins are dualists who draw their power form the Feywild. Because of their commitment to Light, paladins who take the Oath of the Ancients must be good. While there is no “Order of the Ancients,” paladins who take the Oath of the Ancients are trained by and affiliated with some order, be it one connected to a temple or religious order dedicated to the Feywild, an order of druids of the Circle of the Moon, a special military unit, etc.
  • Paladins, Oath of Vengeance: While extremely rare, dualist paladins who take the Oath of Vengeance are lone individuals whose deep commitment to destroy the forces of the Shadowfell channels the power of the Feywild. Most such paladins start by seeking vengeance against a particular target such as a vampire, a pack of ghouls, or dark cleric or necromancer whose undead servants have brought harm to the would-be paladin. Once the initial vengeance has been meted out, an Oath of Vengeance paladin may retire, losing all divine powers (and becoming a fighter with the champion archetype if appropriate), or continue their war against the Shadowfell. Oath of Vengeance paladins are most commonly neutral or lawful neutral in alignment, although some may be neutral good, chaotic good, lawful evil, or neutral evil.
  • Shadow Knights: Shadow Knights are Paladins who serve the Shadowfell. Some Shadow Knights are fallen paladins who had once sworn the Oath of the Ancients; other Shadow Knights begin seeking to serve the Shadowfell and swearing the Oath of Shadow. Shadow Knights are considered Oathbreakers. They are evil in alignment and are granted control of the undead (channel divinity).

In the next Ruins of Malbeth post I’ll take up Malbeth’s pantheon, the third pillar of Malbeth’s religion: The pantheon.

Go to Ruins of Malbeth: Religion, Part 3: Pantheon

Forget the Tavern: That Was Me! Part 1

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This is part of a series of posts on advice for starting a campaign.
Go to Forget the Tavern: Introduction

The first exercise I use is called That Was Me! I learned this technique from a friend as we started a Curse of Strahd campaign. For That Was Me!, each player (including the GM), writes down 2 or 3 summaries of something that a player character in the group did during the group’s shared past. I find it helps that you, as the GM, create one to two examples per player character and share those with the group before you ask the other players to each write one to two more That Was Me! summaries. (In future posts, I’ll provide examples from a D&D, a Night’s Black Agents, and a The One Ring campaigns I’ve run as well as discuss how they shaped our campaign).

Once you have all the That Was Me! contributions, you read them out loud and have players claim them by saying “That was me!” Once a player has claimed a That Was Me!, they sit out the rest of that round, and you continue reading them until everyone has claimed one. If you need to, start reading unclaimed That Was Me! summaries from the beginning and work through the batch again. Once everyone has claimed one, you continue reading so that everyone can claim a second That Was Me!.

I explain to players that while it’s most common to choose a That Was Me! that speaks to them and their early conception of their character, it’s also useful and interesting to choose a That Was Me! that seems completely out of character. It could be a latent aspect of that character which will emerge over time. Or it could be uncharacteristic one-off, which in itself makes for a great story as well as defining who that character isn’t.

Before you write any That Was Me! summaries and ask your other players to do the same, you should decide on a context: How do the player characters know each other? Have they been working for an individual or organization, or all belong to an organization? Did they all grow up together? Have they been pursuing the same goal and have teamed up? Have they never met each other but have all been participants in the same shared dreams?1 (If you go with the dreams, give them context for those dreams such as they were all traveling to a pilgrimage site, or soldiers in an army on the march, or guardians of an artifact. Something concrete and tangible even if the shared dreams involve absurd dream logic.)

Deciding on the context of that shared past helps everyone imagine that past.

In the first D&D campaign I used That Was Me! with, we’d established that the PCs had all signed up to work for an Adventurer’s Guild — the ruler of their kingdom had been an adventurer herself, and she decided that such a guild could harness the adventurous to the kingdom’s benefit. The player characters had all been with the guild doing jobs for six months to a year. They’d worked together in smaller groups, and over time they became an effective team, so they got assigned bigger jobs as a group.

For the past 3 months from the in-game day our campaign started, they’d been assigned to assessors taking population censuses and identifying needs of communities. I told them their last assignment was traveling through a mountain range that marked the northern border of their realm, and that the first adventure would begin on their return trip. (At that point, they would be free to keep taking jobs through the Adventurer’s Guild or strike off on their own.) Creating this shared past with a context, also gave us the opportunity to kick off our first play session with a threat the PCs needed to respond to.

In the next Forget the Tavern post, I’ll share the some of the That Was Me! scenarios I provided the other players in that D&D campaign and discuss how some of them became ongoing touchstones throughout the campaign.

Go to Forget the Tavern: That Was Me! Part 2

  1. I’m thinking of using this shared dream version if I ever run The Fortune’s Wheel Planescape 5e D&D campaign. In it, the PCs wake up with amnesia in Sigil’s mortuary. The logic of the narrative as written is that the PCs will band together because they 1) woke up together, and 2) will want to find out who they are together, although there are plenty of options for them to split up before someone promises to help them figure out who they are. Sure, the social contract of playing in a published campaign means the PCs will likely stick together.

    However, waking up in a room with a bunch of other people not knowing who you or anyone else in the room is but you know you’ve had multiple dreams — clearly dreams rather than memories — involving these people provides a far better reason for the PCs to remain banded together once they escape the mortuary. ↩︎

Ruins of Malbeth Series Index

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The Ruins of Malbeth series is a sequence of posts about my old, abandoned D&D campaign world Malbeth, designed in 2014-15, and my current examination of it to see what I might want to use in a future campaign.

For context, you’ll want to read Ruins of Malbeth: Introduction. As I add posts about Malbeth, I’ll list them here by topic.

Religion in Malbeth

The Micel Kingdoms

Ruins of Malbeth: Religion, Part 1: Animism

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This is part of a series of posts on about an old D&D campaign world called Malbeth.
Go to the original Ruins of Malbeth post.

As I mentioned in the first Ruins of Malbeth post, one of the things I wanted to do with Malbeth was create a comprehensive world that included a diversity of options. One way this design goal played out is the complex, overlapping system of religion.

As I wrote in the player’s guide:

Religion on Malbeth is both complex and fluid, made up of a mixture of animistic, dualistic, and pantheistic systems. For intelligent and semi-intelligent species of Malbeth, religious practice may incorporate any or all of the three systems. For instance, a devout worshiper of the pantheon god Motsognir the Storm may also honor the spirits that inhabit the world around her. Likewise, a devout animist might call upon various deities of the pantheon from time to time, possibly regarding them as powerful named spirits. Even clerics, druids, and paladins may honor more than one system or deity, but their primary devotion will be to the force that grants them their divine powers.

In describing each of the three overlapping systems: Animism, dualism, and the pantheon, I included descriptions of how all this played out with character classes.

Animism

Animism, simply put, is a system of belief which believes spirits or souls inhabit all things living and non-living, or that there is a supernatural power whose existence permeates and animates the material world. Working with that concept, I thought about how animism might play out within the standard D&D cosmology, and wrote this:

The animists of Malbeth believe that spirits inhabit all natural existence, with “natural existence” broadly defined so as to include everything of the material plane natural or constructed, including magic. Likewise, to the extent that they are known, the Astral, Ethereal, Feywild, Shadowfell, and Inner Planes are also inhabited by spirits. While the nature of the Outer Planes are up for debate, strict animists believe that the Outer Planes are no different than the rest of existence.

Some animists believe that the deities of the pantheon are spirits of the Outer Planes so powerful that they can reach out to the Material Plane, while others believe that the pantheon deities are powerful named spirits who govern conceptual realms rather than physical locations and objects.

Monstrous aberrations and the undead are seen as unnatural and, therefore, outside the animistic system.

In practice, this means that animists might greet and thank their tools before and after using them, or touch a doorframe in recognition of the spirit within before walking through a door or entering a building. It might mean not just thanking the spirit of a spring before drinking of its waters but uttering a short pray that recognizes a bottle, cup, and liquid before one drinks.

One that that appealed to me about this was that towns and cities would be as deeply rich in nature spirits as the wilderness. The street one lives on in a city has its own spirit, as does each building on that street, and all the objects and distinct parts of things one wants to count. Ordinary practice developed ways to acknowledge broad swaths of spirits at one time just so people could go about their day, but what all this means is druids can be as much at home in a large city as they traditionally imagined to be deep in the wilderness.

Working with the original 5e subclasses, I designed divine magic classes and animism as such:

  • Clerics: Animist clerics may be of any alignment and choose from any of the following divine domains: knowledge, life, light, nature, tempest, trickery, and war.
  • Druids: Circle of the Land druids are animists who gain their powers from the spirits around them. 
  • Paladins: Oath of Devotion paladins may be animists.
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Go to Ruins of Malbeth: Religion, Part 2: Dualism

Forget the Tavern: Introduction

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If you spend enough time in D&D forums and similar spaces, you’ll come across people asking for ideas on how to start a campaign other than “you all meet in a tavern.” My short response is this:

Begin the campaign in medias res — with action — and with the PCs already an established group with a shared history. There are two major advantages to this strategy:

  1. You can start your campaign off with a memorable moment of exciting action located anywhere in your world. Maybe the PCs are being chased by a horde of orcs, maybe they’re in a deal just about to go bad, maybe they’ve just tracked down someone they’ve been hunting for weeks, maybe their camp or surveillance post is under attack in the middle of the night, or maybe they’re all dangling from a cliff when a dragon or helicopter flies by and they need to find cover before it comes back in for the kill.
  2. The PCs have a history together. There’s no forced camaraderie or “it takes time before I trust others” going on. No wondering why they’re together. They’ve been through all that offstage before the game begins.

Of course, you can’t just hand wave that and tell the players this is the case. Well, you can with the memorable moment of action, but that too can be established through the creation of the group’s past history.

As I would answer these “how do I start a campaign” questions, I further developed my own ideas, which I then put into practice, and then revised my responses until I started a Google Doc that I shared, and, eventually, a workshop for the One-shot Fridays Discord Server.

A good part of these ideas don’t originate with me. Some of them I’ve borrowed from GMs whose games I’ve played in, and some from other sources likeMichael Shea’s Sly Flourish blog and Lazy DM series, Seth Skorkowsky YouTube videos, particularly the Playing RPGs, GM Toolbox, and RPG Philosophy playlists),1 and Justin Alexander’s The Alexandrian blog and now So You Want to Be a Game Master. I know, for instance, that Sly Flourish discusses starting with action in Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master, but I think I started starting campaigns off with action before I read his book.

So, how do you do you establish a pre-existing team of player characters dropped into the game world in medias res? Create the back history first, and then decide the action. As a group, we do this through a variety of exercises in what I call a Session 0.5, after the we’ve made the player characters.

In future posts for this series, I’ll cover activities for establishing shared histories for a party and tie the PCs to the game world before we play, and why I use them. They include

  1. I’m not a big fan of watching YouTube TTRGP advice and actual plays, even by most of the big names out there, so the fact that I look forward to watching Skorkowsky’s videos is worth noting. ↩︎

Ruins of Malbeth: Introduction

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Back in 2014, when I mentioned that I would occasionally buy and read ttrpg books even though I hadn’t played or run a game in over a decade (the most recent books I’d read was the Cubicle 7’s The Laundry ttrpg and some Atlas Games’ Ars Magic 4e supplements), a friend told me I should check out the forthcoming D&D 5e books as an example of ttrpgs as technical writing.

That did it, and I used Meetup to find a local D&D game to join while I indulged in my long-unpracticed love of world building, the result of which is Malbeth (the continent) and the Mickel Kingdoms (the western region).

A light pencil drawing of the continent of Malbeth. It includes geo-political regions as well as major geographical ones such as forests, swamps, deserts, hills, and mountains.

The last serious world building I’d done was in the early 1990s. The map here was drawn over 12 sheets of 8.5 x 11 inch paper, and I wanted it to include a bit of everything. (The thumbnail image here is hard to see — the lines and names in the digital file are light as I was intending to use the to create a digital hex map. Clicking on that ghostly image (or this link) will take you to a larger version — still not a great image, but better.)

Not only did I give every region its own Köppen climate classification, I wanted every player character species to be represented by multiple cultures of varying stages of technological development from nomadic hunter-gatherers to high medieval city-states. You want to play a barbarian halfling, elf, or dwarf (or gnome, human, or dragonborn)? There was a tribe for that, wether it was nomadic halflings shifting from hunter-gatherers to an agrarian culture, cloud forest wood elves, or a stone-age dwarven kingdom that rejected smiting and metal other than than to create religious symbols. (Gnomes, dragonborn, and humans had their own hunter-gatherer tribes, too.)

There was a dragonborn empire modeled on the Ottoman Empire, a millennia-old mesa-top human kingdom where high elves had found refuge, living in protected forest groves on the mesa and a roughly square mile of forest inside the walls of the capital city. Other realms included a hill dwarven kingdom with a vast network of tunnels connecting dwarven holds to the fortified villages of human subjects who had pled fealty to the dwarven monarchs. There were swamp elves who helped others transport goods through the vast swamp, and a halfling island kingdom known for its scholars and great libraries. There was even a hobgoblin-ruled kingdom open to everyone who consented to live under the hobgoblin’s firm but fair rule.

And there was an order high elf assassins and monks ever keeping watch from their mountain monastery for a return of the Valaraukar, the shadow people who occasionally made incursions into Malbeth after their civilization disappeared some 10,000 years prior, roughly 2,00 years before elves first came to Malbeth.

In 2016, I started a campaign there, but eventually abandoned it because I’d become too attached to it. Malbeth had become a place to tell my stories rather than stories collaboratively created with players. I could have fixed that, but at the time I’d come to realize that I’d discovered Kobold Press’s Midgard setting, and I when I realized Kobold Press’s founder and publisher Wolfgang Baur was one of my favorite D&D designers from the early 1990s, that was that, and I have run 4 campaigns in Midgard since.

As I’m thinking about my next D&D campaign, I’m finding I want to run in a new setting, and that’s got me thinking again about Malbeth. Not as an already made setting but as something to pillage ideas from just as I’m going to pillage ideas from Midgard as I come up with something new.

And so, I’ll revisit Malbeth and how I might use it through a series of posts using the Ruins of Malbeth category.

Browse the Ruins of Malbeth Series Index